Public Technical Roadmap

Public Technical Roadmap

This is a brief statement about what we are up to and where we are going with respect to technical developments. This is in relation to the wider EPrints community, rather than just our customers, or internally. For customer focused direction see the “Customer Technical Roadmap”.

Updated October 2019 by Justin Bradley

What have we done recently?

EPrints 3.4.1 development release

(Our existing EPrints 3.4 hosted customers will have received an upgrade automatically.)

3.4.1 is a minor update from 3.4.0, with a small number of internal changes mostly related to making the system more flexible.

A number of new ingredients are also available with 3.4.1

Date picker, allowing date input fields to use a jQuery based date or date range picker.

Rich text editor, allowing rich text to be entered and rendered as HTML. A drop in replacement for what has traditionally been a multiline plain text form input.

“Annotations” support. A first version of a new type of plugin, which supports being able to add arbitrary metadata to parts of the existing EPrints system. Eg administrative notes about a particular eprint field, or record. Or a threaded discussion on a deposited item or normal page. Can be used to communicate or record provenance or even usage information about data within the system.

Impact flavour released – The research impact capture version of EPrints as commissioned by the University of Glasgow is now publicly available. See https://files.eprints.org/2398/

REF2021 – We offer a support package for our customers relating to the next REF. The plugins which help underpin this support, i.e. REFCC and REF Support are released publicly and have been updated regularly.

Reporting – We have been working on improvements allowing for more flexible and readable reporting in EPrints, primarily in the area of producing CSV reports. This has resulted in a new public version of the Generic Reporting Framework, as well as a drop in update to the existing Multiline CSV export feature.

ORCID – We have been working with contributors from the community to improve upon our ORCID integration work and are keen to expand this further.

Enabling all Datasets to optionally have ‘history’ – so audit trails of changes can easily be seen for more of the repository.

Text-based access tables – allowing access tables to be funnelled off to compressed text files resulting in a much smaller database.

What we are doing next?

REF2021 – We will continue our support of REF activities in the EPrints context.

ORCID – There is interest in further work in this area, so we are very likely to expand upon the existing offerings. With a focus on improving the record imports as well as the automatic import/export features.

ResourceSync – We are investigating working with ResourceSync, allowing EPrints to interoperate with even more systems.

GDPR – To work with the community to produce tools to help manage GDPR requests within EPrints. Providing a toolset for deeper searches and bulk data removal.

EPrints 3.4.3 core development

Integrate the new default ingredients, so date picker and rich text are better supported by default configurations.

Add lower level support for annotations at a core level, so these can be used more effectively.

Investigate new workflow layouts, as more fields are added over time, especially in the publications repository case, the deposit workflow can become unwieldy.

Support multiple dates at core level, rather than via the DatesDatesDates plugin.

Add improved support for multiple record identifiers.

More plugin ingredients to bundled with public EPrints: Xapian facets, offering guided searches of EPrints content. Panels, offering a flexible and tider way to lay out summary pages.

Better support for Arts focused outputs, with better support for videos and images in the public record summary pages.